EU "Clean IT" Project Considers Terrorist Content Database 101
schliz writes "Internet users could contribute to an official blacklist of suspected terrorist content under a budding 'Clean IT' project, backed by the European Commission. Participating governments are putting together 13 proposals in a text that commits web hosts, search engines and ISPs to helping to weed out content that incites acts of terror. From the article: 'Among those 13 courses of action is a proposal for a system that will allow users to "flag" content they believe to be illegal when surfing the web. These alarms would be sent for review to the service provider and in turn, a government agency.'"
Already broken (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha! Broken even before that. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's broken even without needing someone to write malware that abuses it.
Have you interacted with some of the people on the Internet? They're fucking insane already.
Giving them an opportunity to flag anything they disagree with for "governmental review" would result in them flagging just about everything.
Purely Hypothetically... (Score:5, Insightful)
Flag or no flag, team EU?
In all seriousness, this seems like a dreadful idea both on just about every level.
Cultural? I'm trying to think of ways to make more of a mockery of the sort of Enlightenment ideals that Europe managed to produce at one time. I'm having a hard time thinking of one. Yeah, why not build a massive system of sniveling, anonymous censors in order to combat a 'threat' that kills fewer people than seasonal hot/cold snaps by at least an order of magnitude. Good plan there.
Practical? Well, let's see here: As with the relentless 'zOMG Craigslist prostitution!!!' moral panics, what better place for those who wish you harm than shouting about it on the internet? Highly visible, way less anonymous than it feels unless you really do it properly, and comparatively easy to see which fish are biting. You want to drive them away from the venues where your pet geeks can monitor at wire speed and into more clandestine locations where you need to groom human intelligence assets with convincing beards and accents? Dumbass.
Technical? Bots will probably be programmatically flagging things in order to downrank them more or less as enthusiastically as keyword comment spam is currently deployed to uprank things. Never mind the less relentless; but more dangerous and focused, potential for assorted political/commercial/psycho ex/psycho roommate drama.
Legal? Say hello to endless wrangling about what is and isn't 'incitement', most likely with clumsy overreactions against the harmless, clueless, and impolitic, along with free traffic in assorted slang, inuendo, and more or less subtle dog-whistle stuff.
This plan has holes that(where one to be so inclined) a truck bomb could be driven through...
Re:Ha! Broken even before that. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ha! Broken even before that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ha! Broken even before that. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Is this really about terrorism? (Score:5, Insightful)
The point isn't to prevent terrorists. Governments create terrorists.
The point is to use terrorism as an excuse for censorship, in the same way terrorism is used as an excuse for resource wars and political oppression.
Re:Purely Hypothetically... (Score:4, Insightful)
If one, by way of a thought experiment, imagines that there existed a corrupt, secular, society ruled by satanic decadence, impious appetite, and foreign policy injustices, could it theoretically be argued that jihad would constitute a duty under certain historically extant strains of abrahamic divine command theories of ethics?
Christian jihad is exempt from the usual scrutiny. It's only people who dress and act differently than us that are terrorists. Everybody knows that. -_- And all this legislation would do is codify our prejudice into law... today it's terrorism, before that it was communism, before that, fascism... there'll always be an intangible "ism" that we're at war with, and this "ism" will be all the justification our government needs to become an "ism" itself to its people.
Re:Ha! Broken even before that. (Score:3, Insightful)
A state-owned 'idiot' list. That's an seriously useful database to have. If I was an employer I'd gladly pay for a copy of that. We could also cut back on their social services payments - if they've got enough free time to sit all day on the Internet then they don't deserve benefit handouts.
More broken than you think (Score:4, Insightful)
Usually when illegal material is found on a server hosted by an Internet company and is removed,
If content can be illegal and be removed, the system is already broken.